TROUBLE by Patrick Somerville

Reviewed by Mark Woollams

Trouble is Patrick Somerville’s first novel and on its pages the modern man stands awkwardly on display. Trouble is a complicated case study on the male perspective, it is one that is never seen on any television channel, read in any magazine or heard on any album. Instead, Somerville is real. Free of the false pretenses which seem to pervade the other, off base, perspectives, Somerville is “right on” in so many of these stories.

Somerville tells it like it is in a world where such honest perspectives are left disfigured and distorted under the guise of those claiming to present the “male perspective.” Somerville’s book is funny, edgy and true, qualities which present the reader with a bittersweet view on the pitfalls of day to day life. In stories like “The Shadowy Deathblow,” “Puberty,” and “The Cold War,” men are presented at different points of life struggling to maneuver the hurdles which we all deal with on a daily basis.

You should read Trouble because Somerville refuses to bullshit. If you’re a male or have ever known one the book will open your eyes, slap some sense into you and leave you gratified with a sense of common place struggle. Just as Jay in “So Long, Anyway” cannot help but honor sincerity; a reader of this book will find Somerville’s own honesty to be commendable. Patrick Somerville’s Trouble presents the modern man in full glory: naked and raw, lost and lonely, forever seeking but always finding perfection to be but a few inches beyond an ideal grasp